Between posting your updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube and checking in via Foursquare and ShopKick, you may get the feeling you're a texting, walking (i.e., mobile) personal broadcast center. If so, you're halfway to the conclusion drawn by Liz Crawford that "the shopper is the medium," an essential tenet laid out in her thought-provoking new book, The Shopper Economy.
Ms. Crawford, a RetailWire BrainTrust panelist and senior industry analyst for the Path to Purchase Institute, has a talent for corralling free-roaming trends and concepts into cogent, workable principles. Her fundamental premise is that a new style of consumer economy is emerging, one in which shoppers trade their time, attention and behavior to marketers for forms of compensation that often but don't always result in the acquisition of material goods and services.
"Today there is a new currency that extends beyond the dollar," writes Ms. Crawford. "It is made possible by digital technology, and it can be minted by anyone who has a cellphone. This new currency is behavior."
In Ms. Crawford's new Shopper Economy cash drawer, currency is divided into four denominations:
Attention: Any advertiser knows how difficult it is to win a consumer's attention these days, even for a few seconds. "From an economic standpoint," contends Ms. Crawford, "attention is scarce, and scarcity creates value." Companies such as Virgin Mobile with its "The Sugar Mama" program literally pay shoppers to watch and respond to ads with calling minutes. Yes, the advertiser has to pay consumers for their attention, but they get valuable behavioral data in return. (You begin to see the new economic exchange in action.)
Participation: Similarly, shoppers are also being given incentives ("scrip" is Ms. Crawford's term of choice) to perform tasks, but in this form of currency, active participation in shopping-related activities is required. For example, when users of the ShopKick mobile app walk into a participating store location, her smartphone automatically logs her behavior. The shopper earns "kicks," redeemable at hundreds of stores and restaurants.
Advocacy: Whereas behavioral tracking may be valuable to marketers, tying into a consumer's personal (and in many cases extensive) personal network can theoretically have more immediate and far-reaching benefits. As Ms. Crawford puts it, advocacy is "a continuum, from simple sharing to brand evangelism."
Loyalty: For most traditional (and widely denigrated) forms of passive loyalty marketing, there's not much of a Shopper Economy exchange taking place since, by definition, shoppers aren't earning scrip for "behaving." However, if you believe programs such as Safeway's new Just For U represent the new wave in personalization, there will be scads of digital currency being swapped, and maybe even some real loyalty being engendered.